


The Dance

by stereonightss



Category: Naruto
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), M/M, canon noncompliant, uchiha culture, uchiha family dynamics, uchiha psychology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-12 00:36:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 7
Words: 12,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20555327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stereonightss/pseuds/stereonightss
Summary: “Do you love me, then?”There’s a brief but pregnant moment where the rush of the rapids and the whisper of the leaves in the wind makes Itachi’s head feel like it’s full of Aburame war bees. Then Shisui laughs, and it’s a raven’s rich tripping laughter, cutting through the dark like lightning.“Read the hidden meaning under hidden meaning and tell me what you see.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> *** Note: I’ve read the manga twice but have never watched the anime. So all of my info comes from the manga.
> 
> In the manga it’s not totally clear how old a lot of the characters are. Itachi in particular is hard to pin down. In my headcanon, and in particular for this fic, I age some of the characters up for plausibility. If Shisui and Kakashi both fought well enough in the third war to earn nicknames, I feel like they have to be at least twelve by the war, four years before the kyuubi attack. 
> 
> If Kakashi is 16 during the Kyuubi attack, I’m estimating Shisui’s age at 15 and Itachi’s at 9. Itachi is therefore 18 when he kills his clan, and Shisui dies at 24. Itachi, when Sasuke finally kills him, is also 24 years old.

The very first thing Sasuke can remember is a warmth on his cheek. His face is pressed skin-to-skin, smushed into dry heat and a smell like blackberry blossoms and salty earth, and the smell is heaven and the cocoon of arms is the cup of the earth that holds sea and sky, and the face that smiles down is the warmth of the blazing sun. He doesn’t know it yet, can barely know anything at all in his yet developing brain, but the arms around him are his brother’s, a mere child’s, though the memory is of a benevolent god. And among the superior things the Uchiha can claim is memory, deeply carved and vivid forever.

Mikoto dons her ritual garb, a sleeveless shift with a wide embroidered belt, a woodpecker’s banded tailfeathers in her hair. It’s almost time for the festival of the two flames.

“Please, mother,” Itachi says, shifting Sasuke in his arms. “It calms him.”

Mikoto huffs, eyes full of affection. The spin of her sharingan as she checks for Fugaku in the nearby rooms gives Itachi a rare thrill.

“You know this is a woman’s dance,” she says. “You’ll be the clan head some day, Itachi. You mustn’t let anyone, especially your father, catch you doing it.”

Itachi closes his eyes, presses his cheek to Sasuke’s head. Sasuke struggles in his swaddling, makes cranky little noises against Itachi’s neck.

“He won’t catch me any longer. Please, mother.”

Mikoto sweeps the stiff curtain of her hair over her shoulders and stands, steps away from her vanity. From the wall above the bed she takes down a rattle, a bundle of stiff dried leaves and a web of loosely bound acorn beads with a woven cord handle. She shifts her weight from foot to foot as she tests the rattle in the quiet of the candlelit bedroom, her sharingan spinning to life with the clack and jitter of the beads.

“See?” Itachi says into Sasuke’s feather-soft hair. Sasuke grunts and cracks his sleepy eyes. “There, there.”

Mikoto rolls her shoulders and her hips, pivoting on her left foot as she taps the rattle against her thigh. She weaves her open right palm through the air as she dances, letting it move her, pantomiming a cobra’s undulating head that sways to the tune she quietly sings.

“I danced in the fire when the world was begun, I danced for the moon and the stars and the sun…”

The second thing Sasuke can remember is a voice in his ear, clear and sweet, a hum through the chest that cradles and rocks him. It’s a melody burned into his mind, ancient Uchiha firesong older than Madara and even Madara’s father’s father, and the melody is warmth and calm and safety.

“Look,” Itachi says as the flame bursts out from the center of Mikoto’s hand. It washes the room in golden light. Sasuke coos and goes still in Itachi’s arms, small dark eyes locked on the dancing tongues of flame that rise from his mother’s palm.

“Mikoto,” says the woman in the doorway. “It’s time.”

The flames flitter out, leaving a wisp of blue smoke. Mikoto hangs the rattle, presses a kiss to Itachi’s forehead.

“Take care of your brother, now.”

The third thing Sasuke can remember is loss, terrible loss, as the heat goes away and takes with it the blackberry blossoms and salty earth.

A raven pecks at the window, tapping until it can wedge its shiny black beak into the gap.

“Shisui?” Itachi says. “Here, little brother, you’re okay.”

He carefully lays the baby in the bassinet and pads over to the window.

“Welcome,” he says as the bird flits in.

A swirl of feathers leaves Shisui crouching on the floor beside Mikoto’s vanity. He’s got leaves in his hair and his clothes are damp.

Shisui looks up with eyes mangekyo red and grins. Itachi shivers. He knows on an intellectual level that the older boy served and killed in the third great war, the fastest thing on the battlefield after the late Hokage, and just as deadly. He knows that the lazy crouch and the toothy smile are a diversion, that the power crackling beneath Shisui’s happy-go-lucky demeanor is a killer’s power. The gentle, clever hands that weave daisy chains and make flutes from the river reeds are a killer’s hands.

“Hmm. I thought you were a crow. You look like a drowned rat.”

Itachi abhors killing, but he likes the bright cast to Shisui’s dark-lashed eyes when he’s up to something wicked.

“Crows and ravens are different, silly. The elders are all at the forum.”

Itachi knows he should look into the red red eyes and think danger danger danger, but the thumping of his heart in the back of his throat is something else, something giddy, drawing him like a magnet to the older boy’s iron-hard core.

Itachi sweeps his hair from his eyes and gently rocks the bassinet.

“I’m well aware—I’m the man of the house until mother and father return.”

“Yeah. But they’re all there. Do you know what that really means?”

Itachi hums quietly, gives his little finger to the hand that’s freed itself from the swaddling. Sasuke fusses and coos and grips his brother’s finger with impressive strength for his tiny body.

“It means fewer people tending the wards on the pantry building.”

“And?”

Itachi pauses, dark eyes distant with insight.

“It’s almost the solstice. So they’re preparing for the feast as well.”

Shisui grins.

“Ding ding ding. You got it, whiz kid.”

Itachi licks his lips. He pushes chakra to his face, to his nose, and he can pick threads of honey and red bean and citrus out from between strains of mud and exertion and Nakano riverwater that drips from Shisui’s mop of damp curly hair. He must have swam from the storehouse to the dock outside the head house.

“What did you bring us?”

Shisui’s face goes round with a smile that crinkles his big dark eyes. He pulls a sealing scroll from the waterproof pouch strapped to his thigh. One by one he taps the marks that hold their bounty.

“Some kumquats,” he says, chucking a handful across the room. Itachi pulls a cluster senbon from his hip holster, lightning-fast, and spears each tiny fruit to the wall with a series of muted thuds

“God, you are terrifying,” Shisui says as he pulls out the next item. “There’s a sweet potato.”

Itachi’s eyes brighten.

“Roast it with your katon! Sasuke loves sweet potato.”

“Inside?” Shisui says, raising his eyebrows.

Itachi stares at him blankly.

“Inside it is.”

Shisui huffs in a breath and tosses the potato in the air. He blows a tiny fireball through his thumb and forefinger and sears the potato black as it falls. Itachi spears it with a kunai before it hits the ground and sets it down on the vanity to cool.

“Oh, I have a peach,” Shisui says, licking his lips. “The peach is mine though.”

“And?”

Shisui pulls a dripping skewer from the scroll.

“And, duh. Obviously. Dango.”

Itachi withdraws his finger from his brother’s grasp and kneels on the floor next to Shisui. Shisui pulls a piece from the skewer and presses it to Itachi’s pursed lips, and it leaves a smear of sticky sauce across his cheek.

“You’re a menace,” Itachi says as he slaps at Shisui’s hands, though a little smile plays at his lips.

“Eat up, buttercup.”

“You eat it, you fiend!”

Itachi sweeps Shisui’s feet out from under him, and the older boy hits the ground laughing.

Sasuke, startled by the noise and fearful in the absence of Itachi’s hand, stifles a cry and reaches out into the void. At his tender age, nothing of the void reaches back. It won’t be long, though, before something dark and lonesome fills the space his brother leaves behind.


	2. Chapter 2

Mikoto pulls four plates from the cabinet. She ladles vegetable stew over rice for each of her sons and slides a small portion of fish onto Sasuke’s plate.

“Okay, my dears,” she says as she sets down the plates.

Itachi huffs quietly and pushes at a potato with his spoon.

“Oniiiichan don wanna?” Sasuke says, picking up a piece of fish with his chubby little fingers and thrusting it toward Itachi’s mouth.

“No, no, little brother. That’s for you.”

Sasuke, three years old but already very bright, fixes Itachi with his dark eyes and asks his favorite question.

“Why?”

“Eat with your spoon, Sasuke,” Mikoto says from the sink.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t eat fish, Sasuke.”

“You’re making a mess,” Mikoto says.

Sasuke looks from his sticky hands to Itachi’s placid face.

“Why?”

“You know the little fishes in the Nakano river?”

Sasuke nods, eyes wide.

“Well in order for us to eat them, they have to die.”

Sasuke stills, making oily handprints on the kitchen table as he considers this new information.

“Like the bird?”

Itachi smiles.

“Yes, like the bird we buried.”

Sasuke pushes his plate away with a frown. Mikoto sighs and pushes it back at him.

“If you want to get big and strong, my son, you’ll eat this fish. Your father works himself raw so we can have the food we eat and the clothes we wear.”

Sasuke startles and straightens up at the F word. The F word never fails.

“Momma. Where’s father?”

“At work,” Mikoto says with a tone that ends the conversation. “Eat your dinner.”

Itachi purses his lips. He watches his mother prepare and set aside a dish for their mostly absent father. The chief of police is a busy man, even without the added duties of a clan head.

“Itachi,” she says, and both boys can hear the strain in her voice. It makes them bow their heads, touched by a delicate guilt. “Eat. Please.”

Itachi watches his mother flit around the kitchen and wonders if she knows where Fugaku really is. It’s a Monday night, and Fugaku is sure to be at the tavern on the outskirts of the compound with his deputy. It’s a longstanding date, one Itachi found out about over a year ago. The story is they’re planning the beat rotations for the following week, evaluating each squadron’s quotas. But Itachi suspects it has more to do with the drinks than the bureau. Who would do important clerical work over sake, after all.

Mikoto must know. Itachi knows, after all. But at a wizened thirteen, Itachi’s beginning to suspect this is one of those things adults pretend not to know.

Itachi sticks his little fingers in the corners of his mouth and whistles a songbird’s call, lifelike and loud. It’s a trick he picked up from Shisui, using birdsong to broadcast information when ANBU hand signals won’t reach a team mate’s line of sight. Mikoto rubs the bridge of her nose, but Sasuke’s eyes dance with delight.

“Birdie coming in for a landing.”

Itachi swoops a spoon of food toward Sasuke’s mouth, and he eats, eyes crinkled in a smile.

Just as Itachi is sending another spoon of food soaring into his brother’s open mouth, a raven hocks its dark, gravelly caw in the courtyard. Mikoto slams a plate into the sink. The calls out three times, pauses, then calls three times more.

Itachi puts the spoon down, slips out of his seat and brings his plate to the counter.

“Thank you for dinner, mother. I’m going to train now.”

Mikoto flashes him a pained look, because his food is nearly untouched.

“Be safe. Try to be home before sunrise.”

“Me too! Me too!”

Itachi smoothes Sasuke’s hair down and taps him very gently on the forehead.

“Maybe next time, little brother.”

Itachi’s back is turned when Sasuke’s face falls. Sasuke is young, but he is Uchiha, and he quietly bites down the tears that threaten to spill as he watches his brother disappear out the hall window, noiseless as a ghost.

Itachi leaps into the courtyard, then down to the street below the head house. Shisui is perched high above on the arm of an oak, waiting. He flickers down to the walkway next to Itachi and makes the hand signs for silence, then follow.

Shisui motions to his pack with a sly smile, where the shape of a bento presses through the cloth, and Itachi finds his appetite again. This is a familiar dance, an old one: Shisui stirs up Itachi’s thirsts—for color, for knowledge, for the scent of the linden blooms in syrupy summer heat, so much like his favorite foods, sweet and seasonal. Shisui brings warmth and vibrancy to Itachi’s keen but cool existence, stirs up his deeper yearnings until Itachi is bursting with the fullness of his senses, spilling over like the roaring falls at the valley of the end.

Shisui’s in his jounin blacks, sword strapped to his back. He’s nearly as tall as Fugaku now at 19, and he’s starting to grow into the breadth of his shoulders. Hs looks feral with his unruly hair haloed in the streetlight, eyes glinting red and full of mischief where malice should be—and Itachi, besotted, though he doesn’t put a name to the feeling, is alive with hunger, quickened by the steep pull, a budding desire where there should be fear.

The sun is slipping behind the trees, bathing the village in broad strokes of pink and purple. Shisui is an inkblot on the watercolor sky, edging up through the canopy to flicker from treetop to treetop. Itachi does his best to follow as they chase the sun west through the forest toward the rocky overhang at a hairpin bend in the Nakano.

Momiji ridge—their place.

When the treeline gives way to rocky crags, Shisui flickers to Itachi’s side.

“Race you to the ridge,” he says.

Itachi sets off instantly, knowing he needs the meager lead. He can hear Shisui’s rich laughter from five different directions as he bounds over the rough terrain, pushing pushing pushing until the world around him blurs with the speed of it.

Itachi feels the sting of exertion in his lungs, and this too is a hunger sated, his blood pumping wild in his chest, thumping sharp behind his eyes as he uses the sharingan to pick the surest path forward.

This is a test, a contest, part of Shisui’s ever-changing demands on Itachi’s body. But it feels less like training, more like a game, and not just for the trilling lightness Itachi feels around Shisui more and more.

Itachi lights upon the big willow that hangs over the rocky outcrop, the finish line, to find Shisui sitting cross-legged on the ground.

“Too slow by a mile. Less thinking, more running next time.”

He’s is sitting in front of an open bento, holding out a rice ball.

“Here. It’s ume.”

Itachi drops down from the willow, sloppy and graceless, hitting the ground with an exaggerated plop because he knows when he pouts (or pretends to) it makes Shisui wrinkle his nose in delight.

“Thank you.”

Shisui watches Itachi eat, waiting in the stealth stillness for the quiet hum of pleasure that follows a well prepared bit of food.

“It’s tasty.”

“I went to ten different places to find those plums,” Shisui says, clearly pleased with himself.

Itachi peers up at him through long lashes, then looks back down at the rice ball. He tilts his head like a bird, considering how the rice balls have gotten larger over the years, growing to the shape and size of Shisui’s generous palms.

“That’s very kind. I—I never cook for you.”

“You’re a disaster in the kitchen.”

“Well. Still, I’d like to repay you somehow.”

Shisui smiles.

“No need, silly.”

Shisui prides himself on being the one person who can get away with calling the future clanhead silly without having to dodge a shuriken or five. He swings his long legs over the ledge of the rock and kicks the mist that rises up from the rapids, and watches Itachi from the corner of his eye.

“I just sharpened my kunai. I could give you one,” Itachi says. “If you need.”

Shisui washes Itachi with a sweep of his big, dark eyes.

“Pass.”

“I made some exploding tags. Would you care for a poison smoke bomb?”

“Double pass.”

Itachi chews thoughtfully.

“Oh, perhaps a scroll I recovered of some ancient Hyuuga clan jutsu. You could have it if you like.”

Shisui makes a sour face.

“Triple pass.”

Itachi frowns, eyes distant. Shisui cocks his head.

“Okay, whiz kid. Explain yourself. Don’t forget to show your work.”

Itachi looks from the half empty bento to Shisui’s face. The song of the frogs and crickets ratchets up notch by notch as the stars creep over the eastern band of trees. It’s a warm night, humid enough that Itachi tells himself the dampness in his palms isn’t nerves.

He takes a deep breath.

“Well. It seems to me that the machine of society works on the basis of exchange. I go on a mission for the village, the village gives me money. I go to the store, the proprietor gives me dango, and I give her the money.”

Itachi takes a moment to chew and swallow the last of the rice ball.

“Father provides for mother and brother and me, and mother cooks for him and cleans the blood off his uniform. I cover for Kakashi when he breaks protocol, and he covers me in turn when I deviate from mission directives that call for avoidable murder.”

Shisui inclines his head, and Itachi takes the cue to continue.

“The clan gives its members a sense of purpose. It organizes their chaotic thoughts and rids them of their existential horror, if only by replacing it temporarily with fanaticism. In exchange, they defend and uphold the clan, even if it means creating straw men against whom to defend it. You know, in order to sustain their dogmatic fervor, which, as I said, is their only recourse against existential dread.”

Impressive as it is, every time Itachi lets his true brilliance shine, it makes Shisui ache a little for his companion’s long lost childhood. Not that his own was any better, but still—

“Recursive nonsense,” he says, throwing a rock into the rapids. “When you realize that the clan and its members are one and the same.”

“But are they really,” Itachi says, voice tight with emotion, “if we the constituent parts can hold in our minds the abstraction that is ‘clan,’ believing on a deep level that it is separate from—and superior to—us?”

Shisui looks Itachi up and down with something mournful coloring the amusement in his eyes. He’s a slip of a thing, all limbs and angles at the cusp of fourteen, though his yet petite frame belies the strength there. He’s fiercely brilliant, and it ages him around the eyes. The depth of his understanding gives him old eyes, weary eyes. He’s so strikingly beautiful in the low light of evening, even in his seriousness, even edged with that blue solemnity, that in the rare moments he truly smiles, Shisui can barely stand to look at him.

“Reign it in, whiz kid. What about all that makes you want to trade your kunai for the rice balls I make specifically for you?”

“Well,” Itachi says, folding and unfolding his hands. “It’s exactly because you make them for me. Because you train with me even though you’re stronger than me—”

“Debatable.”

“—and you take a lot of time to do things with me. And for me.”

“And?”

“And. I often have trouble delineating the subtextual transactions in our discourse. It seems…inequal.”

“In whose favor?”

Itachi blushes, and Shisui bites back a groan, because something important is being passed here, Itachi is looking to him for guidance.

“Mine. In my favor,” Itachi says.

Shisui levels Itachi with a blank stare.

“Our discourse of snacks is slanted in your favor. And this worries you? I promise there are bigger things to worry about. Famine in the land of wind. Bandit hordes in rain country. The troubling state of your little brother’s hair, I mean, is it gonna stick up like that forever? I hope for his sake it’s not.”

Itachi goes cool and disaffected, the way he does when he puts on his ANBU mask. He can tell he’s being gently played with. Shisui is wearing the same look he wears when they’re practicing taijutsu and it’s ten to one odds that Itachi will end up laid out with an aching back, all cat to Itachi’s mouse, Itachi’s slippery weasel. Only Shisui is a panther, a thick-muscled tiger, latent power wasting in peacetime behind that mischievous smile.

“Shisui. I’m serious. It goes beyond snacks, and you know it.”

Shisui looks Itachi up and down, takes in the tense set of his shoulders, the bunching of the muscles in his jaw. He softens.

“Let me ask you this: what do you get in exchange for taking care of Sasuke?”

Itachi stares down at the rapids and hums.

“You feed him, I feed you. Is it any different?”

“Well,” Itachi says. “Well, obviously, that’s different. He’s young, he relies on me”

“He relies on your mother too.”

“Correct.”

“And so do you.”

Itachi flinches.

“No, I—”

“You allow her to care for you. Because by doing so, you give her an opportunity to express her love for you.”

“I give her a reason to feel fulfilled in her duties as a mother, even though—”

“Even though you could take care of yourself.”

Itachi’s voice drops low.

“Lots of children in this village take care of themselves. Many of them younger than me.”

“And you think that’s okay?” Shisui says.

“No,” Itachi says, eyes distant. “No, I suppose I don’t.”

“So, to clarify, you care for Sasuke because he relies on you. And you allow your mother yo care for you out of pity for her unfulfilling station.”

“Right.”

“Wrong,” Shisui says, punching Itachi’s shoulder.

Itachi ducks his head, not one to bear failure without at least a little pout—he’s still thirteen, after all. Shisui lays his open palm against the slim exposed plane of Itachi’s neck and leaves it there until he feels the younger boy relax.

“Itachi. You do it because you love them.”

Itachi’s head snaps up, eyes uncharacteristically wide. Shisui withdraws his hand, but tugs on Itachi’s earlobe as he goes, a little show of affection. Shisui’s full of them.

“There’a nothing transactional about love. Text, subtext, context, whatever. Love is its own reason for being,” he says. “And love is the reason why we do a lot of the things we do.”

He savors the open look of shock and wonder on Itachi’s face, activates his sharingan to save to permanence the moment the future clanhead turned his formidable brainpower to the concept of love. Shisui can just about see the younger boy’s internal world shifting. He extends the bento and grins.

“Now eat up, buttercup. We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”

Itachi takes the last rice ball, and thinks of the difference between love and duty. He thinks of his mother’s expressive face, about the strength and speed and kill count that made her a good candidate for clan head’s bride. He thinks about the way her eyes used to dance when she went to the market with the late Hokage’s late wife, laughing free and easy. How they used to lay hands on one another’s pregnant bellies, planning fantasy futures, imagining grandchildren with red eyes and red hair.

He thinks about the way the hard set of his father’s jaw softens when he confers with his deputy, his shadow, bound by an ancient Uchiha ritual to protect and support him.

He thinks of the way his parents move around one another, efficient, coordinated, but cool and dry as a Suna night. He thinks about Fugaku, distant and austere, tight with approval and downright stingy with affection.

And then he thinks of Shisui, his wide smiles and warm hands, his open face, open heart, his little touches all inviting in. An uncomfortable weight settles in the pit of Itachi’s stomach.

“Did your parents love each other?”

Shisui hugs his knees and gives Itachi a soft look.

“They really, really did.”

“What about your father’s shadow?”

“Different kind of love,” Shisui says. “Still love, though.”

Itachi flops onto his back and sighs.

“It’s quite complicated, it seems.”

“You’re making it harder than it has to be, whiz kid,” Shisui says, laying back next to him. He folds his hands under his head and traces the blooming constellations in the new night sky.

“You’ll understand it all some day. I promise.”

Itachi tilts his chin, tries to pick apart the shapes between the silhouettes of the dense packed trees.

“I suppose you already do, then.”

Shisui laughs.

“Oh, yeah, sure. I’m a love machine. I’m a love master. It’s why I’ve never even been on one successful date, ever, and I’ll be a virgin till the day I die,” he says with some put-upon misery.

“I suspect that has more to do with the fact that you don’t brush your hair,” Itachi says, the ghost of a smile on his lips.

“Hey now, I’m southern branch Uchiha. Strong stock. We’re proud of this hair on the south side.”

“You people are also proud of that abomination of a sweet you call candied yam.”

“I—ugh, you have the palate of a toad. And—Kagami had this hair.”

“Did he fail to brush his as well?”

Shisui shoves at Itachi’s face, and they scuffle for a moment before flopping back on their backs.

“My hair is a treasure and so am I. You pretty boy east siders wouldn’t understand.”

Itachi’s eyes spin red and the silhouettes tighten into clarity. He can see every leaf, every branch, every crawling, creeping animal. He can see the minute rise and fall of Shisui’s breathing in his expanded peripheral vision. It’s how he knows Shisui’s breath catches when he asks the next question.

“Do you love me then?”

There’s a brief but pregnant moment where the rush of the rapids and the whisper of the leaves in the wind makes Itachi’s head feel like it’s full of Aburame war bees. Then Shisui laughs, and it’s a raven’s rich tripping laughter, cutting through the dark like lightning.

“Read the hidden meaning under hidden meaning and tell me what you see.”

Itachi thinks for a moment, limbs melting into the moss and patches of grass that streak the rock. His keen eyes follow the erratic wingbeats of bats overhead, almost imperceptible against the darkening sky. The conclusion, when he reaches it, fills him with a spreading warmth.

“Hmm. I see.”

He feels a wide smile unfold across his face, unfamiliar but pleasant all the same. Shisui leans up on one elbow and smiles back at him.

“That’s a good look for you, whiz kid.”

In a quiet rush of wind and motion too fast for even the sharingan to see, Shisui is crouched above Itachi’s head. Red eyes meet his own, and Shisui’s nervous-shallow breath tickles his forehead as they freeze, poised in the coiled focus before battle, or something like it.

Quick as lightning, Shisui presses a kiss to Itachi’s forehead.

“Tag,” he whispers. “You’re it.”

In a flicker so fast it raises a fine cloud of dust, Shisui is gone. Itachi lets himself wear the smile a moment longer before he leaps up and into the trees to give chase.


	3. Chapter 3

Sasuke hikes his hip pouch up and pulls the belt as tight as it will go. He’s grown into his first leg holster, but the bag, a recent hand-me-down from Itachi, is still a little big for him. He’s on the thin side, though he’s taller than some of the other children in the compound who were also born in the year of the fox attack. Both of Mikoto’s boys inherited her slim hips and long limbs. Sasuke looks like Fugaku only in the eyes, though his fiery temperament is his father through and through.

“Now don’t forget, I need salt, half a dozen eggs, and miso. Red miso, okay my son?”

“Yes, mother.”

“Are you armed?”

Sasuke pats his leg holster and nods.

“And you know the way?”

He squints, holding back an eye-roll. Rolling his eyes would earn him a frown, or possibly even a little smack.

“Yes, I know the way.”

Mikoto looks him over and smiles.

“All right then. Come right back when you’re done, okay?”

Sasuke nods, then slips out the door. It’s his first mission to the store alone, a good mission for a seven-year-old soon-to-be ninja cadet. Though, Itachi was going to the store alone by five—but he won’t think of that now. Not when he gets to leave the compound all on his own.

The road from the compound, far on the outskirts, to the downtown area of the village is tree-lined and winding. Nothing much to see for the first half mile, just shacks here and there off woodland trails where excommunicated (and often very old) clan members keep house.

It’s from behind one such leaning, thatched-roof shack that Sasuke hears a distant singing. It’s barely audible over the rushing of the Nakano, but it fills Sasuke with a tingling sense of deja-vu.

He follows the sound down the dirt path, creeping in the shadow of the shack. When he’s just around the corner from the source of the sound, he’s hit with an old hazy memory, and it almost brings him to his knees. Itachi, warm, lit from below by firelight, his voice young and high and sweet.

_I danced in the fire when the world was begun_

_I danced for the moon and the stars and the sun_

_I danced in the fire that was brought to the earth_

_in tongues of flame I had my birth_

The soft, slightly off-key singing from behind the old shack is an Uchiha firesong. Some of the notes are sour or outright wrong, but it’s the same unmistakable melody. Sasuke knows it in and out, it’s one of the songs Itachi would sing to him to try and get him to sleep.

_Dance, dance, wherever you may be_

_I am the lord of the dance, said he_

_to burn, burn will be our delight_

_till by burning, burning, we come round right_

The voice sounds young, but Sasuke doesn’t know of any exiled children. Normally, if a family with a child has their clan status revoked, the children stay in the compound to be raised by the shrinemaids until they make genin.

He peeks around the corner. Sure enough, there’s a child around his age using the mud along the riverbank to make mud balls—a whole armory of mud balls, from the looks of it. The boy is blonde, tawny-skinned, and dressed in dirt-splattered, ragged clothes.

Sasuke scoffs. That child couldn’t possibly be an Uchiha. But then how did he learn the firesongs? Sasuke’s anger makes him careless, and he steps on a dry twig as he advances. The sharp crack echoes in the stillness of the forest.

The boy’s head snaps up in Sasuke’s direction, wide eyes scanning with the quickness of a guilty conscience.

“Who’s there?” says the blonde boy, mud ball raised and ready to throw.

Blue eyes—definitely not an Uchiha.

“Come out, whoever’s there! I’ll fight you!”

Sasuke unhooks the guard on his thigh holster, steps from the shadows and frowns. The blonde child grins and puts the mud down.

“Oh, a kid!”

“Who are you?” Sasuke asks, gripping his kunai.

“I’m nobody and you didn’t see me, okay! Who are you?”

Sasuke considers telling the other boy his name. There’s something arresting in the bright blue eyes, and the smile makes Sasuke nervous, or something like it.

“That song you were singing.”

The blonde boy cocks his head.

“You were singing it wrong. Who taught it to you?”

“I’m a great singer! Super good! Why do you care anyways, huh?”

Sasuke stands, arms crossed, glaring. Itachi sang that song to him, and that gives it something sacred. It doesn’t belong in an outsider’s mouth.

“It’s an Uchiha song. You are not Uchiha.”

The blonde boy’s eyes do something terrible, like clouds drawing over the sun, and the grin is replaced by a forced, muted smile. Sasuke suddenly feels like a monster, not a strong, proud, soon-to-be ninja cadet.

“Oh, huh. This lady used to check up on me when I was really really little. She was a real nice lady,” the boy says. “Used to sing it while she was cleaning up my house and stuff.”

“Check up? Where was your mother?”

The boy looks up at the leaves and sighs.

“That lady had black eyes just like you. She was real pretty. Stopped coming around when I got old enough to feed myself.”

He brushes his muddy hands off on his muddy shorts and trots up to Sasuke.

“Sorry if it’s your song or whatever. I’ll sing another song.”

He thrusts his hand out and grins.

“Uzumaki Naruto. I’m gonna be hokage some day, you better believe it.”

Sasuke’s stunned still by the combined idiocy and shining confidence—really, the idea of this filthy, feral child leading the village is pure foolishness—but his bred-in manners make him shake the kid’s hand on instinct.

“Uchiha…Sasuke. I have to go now.”

Naruto gives him a shrug and then trots back over to his pile of mud balls.

“See ya, Uchiha Sasuke,” he says. “Don’t tell nobody you saw me all right!”

Sasuke finds his way back to the road, Itachi’s voice in his head, singing about flames and dancing. He can’t for the life of him figure out what that empty, haunted look on the Naruto kid meant. Whatever it was, it seemed wrong, and Sasuke didn’t like it one bit.

He’s standing in front of a display of miso paste when he hears the first yelps.

“Oh for heaven’s sake!” says an old woman.

“It’s that child again,” hisses another.

“What a shame,” says a woman his mother’s age, shaking her head.

A series of wet thwacks and a scream later, and Sasuke sees a rush of yellow shoot past the open door, trailing laughter behind. A mud-covered chuunin follows, shaking a fist.

Sasuke pays for his goods with a smile on his face, and it stays there the whole walk home.


	4. Chapter 4

“Come on, braniac, let your hair down for once!”

Shisui’s voice booms over the sound of the rapids to the shore where Itachi stands in his civilian shorts, kicking off his sandals. With no shirt, the sun kissing his lean-muscled, adolescent-thin body, he feels exposed. But with his weapons pouch hanging on a nearby branch and his wakizashi tipped against a tree stump out of reach, he feels positively naked.

“I don’t know about this,” he says, channeling chakra to his feet so he doesn’t slip on the slimy rocks.

There’s a light splash and the mist kicks up, and Shisui’s gone from the water, flickered to god know’s where. Itachi’s sharingan spins to life, and he catches the afterimage of Shisui’s body far on the opposite bank.

The sharp whistle of a kunai flying past his ear from behind is all the warning Itachi gets before broad, warm hands grip him by the elbows.

“You know, I’m starting to think you show me your back on purpose.”

The woven cord that held Itachi’s ponytail sits pinned by the kunai to the muddy shore, and his long black hair spills over his shouders in windswept waves.

“Take a deep breath,” Shisui murmurs in his ear.

The twinge of excitement at being taken by surprise is joined with a sick slipping feeling and pins and needles in his arms and legs as Shisui flickers them to a spot high above a deep stretch of water.

Itachi uses the freefall to twist out of Shisui’s grip and flip over, diving hands-forward into the cold pool. Shisui cannonballs into the water right after him, and they both surface gasping and laughing.

“You are truly awful,” Itachi says, flicking his wet hair over his shoulder.

“You wouldn’t have me any other way,” Shisui says, splashing at him as they paddle over to the shallows.

“That’s not true at all,” Itachi says, gaze dipping down to the beaded water on Shisui’s scar-streaked chest as he stands in the waist-high water. “I’d have you plenty of ways.”

Shisui’s eyes spin red, and redder still. Itachi is momentarily paralyzed by the intensity of his face, lips parted in a sharp exhalation, gaze ruby bright.

“Careful, Itachi,” Shisui says, voice dark. “If you keep baiting me, one of these days I’m gonna bite.”

Itachi flinches and drops his gaze. He knows it’s a sore spot now, one he shouldn’t prod. But he’s fifteen and Shisui of all people brings out his rebellious streak.

“I wish you would,” he mumbles to the water.

“Look at me when you talk to me, please,” Shisui says gently.

Itachi glances up, an apology on the tip of his tongue. But when he meets the red spin of Shisui’s eyes—

He sees himself laying on a bedroll in a meadow, as though he’s floating over his own body. He’s taller, his face a little leaner, hair a little longer, but it’s him there, no doubt about it. He can feel the bedroll and the earth beneath it, and he can smell fresh cut grass and new spring growth and—Shisui.

A hint of tangy sweat as they spar. The plum-sweet huff of warm breath over Itachi’s neck the night Shisui climbed drunk through the window and into Itachi’s bed, curling around him like a snake. The smell of his shampoo on the fragrant steam that hangs in the room after a long post-mission shower. Dried blood and bombsmoke, the metal bite of the body flicker. And under it all, something undefinable, something so essentially Shisui that it stings, burnt cedar and river water and ozone after a summer storm. The hit of raw need hits Itachi low in his belly. He gasps, color rising to his cheeks as his heart thunders in his ears.

A flock of ravens descends from the trees, cackling and screeching as they land on and around his chest. A whirlwind of black feathers leaves Shisui straddling him, face grave, pinning his wrists up above his head.

“Is this what you want?”

Itachi bucks against the hold, and the motion makes him grind up against Shisui’s hips. Itachi gasps again, a sharp suck of breath through his parted lips.

“If it’s what you want, then why are you fighting it?”

Shisui’s pupils blow as his eyes drop to the pink bow of Itachi’s mouth, and he grips Itachi’s slim wrists so tight the bones creak.

“Don’t patronize me,” Itachi says. “I know what I want, and so do you.”

“Itachi,” Shisui says in his darkest voice, eyes projecting a warning.

“No, we’re going to talk about it now. I’ve killed more people than I care to count. But I still don’t know what it feels like to make love, because you’re all I want and—and you won’t have me.”

Shisui’s face softens, and he splays his fingers loose over Itachi’s palms.

“I would. I will. Just not yet.”

Itachi threads their fingers together, searching Shisui’s conflicted face.

“Why? Why won’t you let us do this in the real world?”

Shisui hangs his head, pressing his nose to Itachi’s cheek. His eyes are closed, mouth twisted around a sob, or something like it. He pushes up to standing with a long, trembling exhale. His control is tenuous, but holding—for now.

“You don’t know what you’re asking. I’m not gonna do something you’re not ready for. In a lot of ways, you’re still a child—”

“I am NOT,” Itachi grits, and in a rare flash of anger he breaks the genjutsu. The scene bursts into a chaotic horde of fleeing blackbirds, and leaves them standing in the shallows of the river, panting, eyes fading from red to black.

“I’m sorry,” Itachi says, looking down at his own faintly trembling hands. “That wasn’t very fair of me.”

Shisui softens.

“Hey. It’s okay. Hey, look at me. I’m sorry too. I get pretty heated when it comes to—”

“Lieutenant. Captain. Please excuse me,” says a voice from the shore.

They snap back to awareness with a jolt and turn to face the uniformed Uchiha courier crouched on the riverbank.

“Lieutenant Shisui, you’ve been summoned to the forum. I’ve been instructed to inform you that the petition has been granted. You may state your case to the council.”

Shisui nods to the courier.

“Thank you.”

“Lord Fugaku requests your presence as well, captain.”

“Understood,” Itachi says.

The courier looks them over with a suspicious twist to his lips and bows curtly before disappearing back into the trees.

A gust of wind runs through the river valley, sending all the branches chattering and tossing flecks of leaf-filtered sunlight over the water. Shisui lifts his face to it. It’s a wicked wind, it smells of autumn too soon, but he’s too elated to take the omen for what it is.

Itachi stares out at the space left by the courier, stone-still and quietly thinking. Fluent in the minuscule changes in his companion’s legendary game face, Shisui can read the tension around his eyes.

“Hey. Come here, you,” he says, spreading his arms.

Itachi scans the tree line for signs of life, and when he finds none, closes the space between them. Shisui’s chest is warm and damp and his arms are firm but gentle as they close around his shoulders.

“Itachi,” he says, voice low and private, a rich rumble just a notch above a whisper. “I took a big step. I didn’t ask you beforehand because I was pretty sure your dad would shoot me down. I didn’t want to disappoint you if it was all over before it even started.”

“What did you do?”

“You don’t have to answer now. We can talk about it after I make my case. I want you to hear my reasons first, but I definitely want to talk about it.”

Shisui smiles into Itachi’s neck.

“I wanna talk about us, your question before. Why, and part of it is—it’s stupid, maybe, but I wanted to wait. For this. And I wanna talk about after, about later. Basically, I wanna talk about always.”

Itachi freezes.

“When you say ‘always’—”

“You and me, looking out for each other. I can’t imagine ever not wanting to be by your side. And if anything happened to me, you know, I think it wouldn’t be so bad for you to see the world through my eyes.I’ll follow you to the afterlife and you can tease me in the pure land till we’re born again and—”

Itachi tips his head up to catch Shisui’s lips in his own. His touch is tentative as he reaches up to brush Shisui’s cheeks with his fingertips, feather-soft and careful, so careful. But there’s a crackle of chakra around them that makes Shisui’s hair stand on end. Itachi’s lips are hot next to the cool brush of his damp bangs, and alarm bells go off in Shisui’s head because this is dangerous, Itachi is dangerous and Shisui is wide, wide open. But he lets it happen, feeling his resistance crumbling into nothing as he melts into Itachi’s warm, dango-sweet mouth. Their tongues dart out and Shisui steals the gasp from Itachi’s parted lips when they press close at the waist, the sudden spark of need hidden by the rippling water.

“Fuck,” Shisui hisses when they forcibly part. He cups Itachi’s face, holds him slightly away, not trusting himself to stop. His head is spinning, and the wild thrum of his chakra makes flocks of birds flee the treeline in noisy clouds.

Itachi’s long lashes flutter against his cheek, inviting Shisui’s eye over the high curve of his cheekbones, down to the the bowed, slightly open mouth.

“So, uh, forever,” Shisui starts, swallowing against his own hunger. “How’s that sound to you?”

Itachi inches up on his toes and presses close, hands slipping up around Shisui’s neck, some bittersweet mix of timid and restrained.

“I think I like the sound of it,” he whispers into Shisui’s neck.

Shisui pulls back to look into Itachi’s face again, and what he sees is something raw and open and tentatively happy. Itachi looks young, even younger than he already is, and so alive, so human. It breaks something open in Shisui, and he clutches the younger boy’s body in a fierce hug, drinking in the firesmoke scent of his skin.

“Braid that pretty hair tonight. I don’t want to singe it when we stand before the fire.”

Itachi presses his cheek to Shisui’s shoulder and hopes the streaks of water hide hide his quiet, happy tears.

Around them, the unseasonably cold wind blows.


	5. Chapter 5

“I spy with my little eye…something that is brown.”

Sasuke scans the trees that edge the road from the compound to the center of the village and nods when he sees it.

“South-southwest, third tree beyond the fence. A sleeping quail.”

Mikoto squeezes Sasuke’s hand.

“Correct!”

“Okay, mom, my turn. I spy with my little eye…something that is red.”

Mikoto jerks her thumb behind them without looking.

“The cardinal on the far telephone pole?”

“Using sharingan is cheating,” Sasuke says with a pout.

“I didn’t use it, but more importantly I didn’t need to. I can hear the cardinal singing, even now.”

Sasuke puffs his cheeks out, and Mikoto chuckles.

“It’s called I spy, not I hear,” he says.

“Ah, but a shinobi must use all senses at all times. Develop the habit now, and it’ll be second nature by the time you graduate.”

Mikoto watches her son absorb the lesson and begin to apply it, even to their simple game. Sasuke learns so quickly, picking up on everything around him. He’s so wonderfully open, and he thrives in the communal atmosphere of the compound, where his aunties and uncles and distant cousins all shine back at him the light he naturally bears.

“I spy something running.”

“The river?”

He’s so different from Itachi, she thinks, who seemed to slip into existence with the world already in his head, as cold and distant and brilliant and as the north star.

“I spy something fresh and green.”

“New genin? Over there with Kotetsu. That’s it, isn’t it!”

“Clever boy.”

When they get close enough to downtown to smell the roadside food stalls, Sasuke tugs his hand from his mother’s grasp and slips it into his pocket.

“My son is already too much of a man to be seen with his mother, hm?” Mikoto says, fluffing the back of his coarse hair.

“You never hold my brother’s hand,” Sasuke says, dry as dust.

Mikoto’s breath catches and she pauses in the middle of the busy street, watching as her youngest son walks on ahead without her.

“And I haven’t for a very long time,” she says to herself.

As Sasuke disappears into the crowd of afternoon shoppers and older children out from academy classes, she feels her domestic life slipping away from her, bleached and crumbling like a forgotten sandcastle.

Maybe it’s the pain in her chest, so close to a long-healed knife wound, that reminds her she was once an elite shinobi. Or maybe it’s the children with their weapons pouches and the new chuunin loitering around the food stalls with their hitaiate cocked to the side. Or maybe it’s the smell of charcoal and roast pork that sparks a darker memory of village razed by enemies with its women and children trapped inside. Maybe it’s the potent cocktail of all three; Mikoto suddenly remembers her training.

She hikes up her skirt, tucking a corner into her belt, and leaps into a shadowy alleyway. She ricochets off the narrow brick walls and vaults up onto the roof. Her casual sandals slip on the smooth roof tiles, but like her youngest son she was a taijutsu specialist and compensates easily. She moves quietly and quickly, scanning the crowd below for a peek of his stubborn dark hair.

“Good afternoon,” says a voice from above.

The white fang’s son slumps against a water tower, shielding his eyes from the sun with a worn paperback. He’s in his jounin blacks, the hound’s mask cocked to the side, sending his already wild hair at ridiculous angles.

“Kakashi,” she says. “Nice to see you.”

“Sightseeing on this fine summer day?”

“Son-hunting.”

Kakashi’s visible eye crinkles in a smile. He’s not popular with the Uchiha—too many clansmen resent the late Obito’s decision to give an outsider the sharingan. But Itachi trusts the mirror ninja implicitly, and though Mikoto has her fair share of worries about her eccentric eldest son, she’s never doubted his instincts.

“They’ve kept you boys busy lately, haven’t they.”

“Peace is almost as hard to protect as those cookies you send to HQ.”

Mikoto laughs, remembering her somber son in his blacks and his armor, leaping off toward ANBU headquarters with a gingham cloth full of gingerbread.

“That’s his recipe, not mine, you know. He took to baking a few months ago, and you know him. When he sets about to master a skill…”

Kakashi’s takes a knee and says with exaggerated gravity, “I shall guard the secret with my life.”

They trade smiles as Kakashi resumes his easy lean against the water tower.

“Be safe out there,” she says, and by the serious look in his eye she can tell he understands the warning beneath: take care of my son.

“Happy hunting, madam Uchiha,” he says with a nod.

She returns the gesture and turns back to the street below.

She spots Sasuke in front of a vegetable stall, eyeing some lumpy gold-colored heirloom tomatoes.

“Too predictable, my boy.”

Mikoto makes a wide leap and softens the three-story fall with a rush of chakra to her feet. She lands in a silent crouch, her hair fanning out behind her.

“I spy someone who let their guard down.”

Sasuke whirls, leg raised in a kick that she catches easily. She hooks her arm around his waist, hikes him up onto her shoulder and leaps into the nearest alley.

“Mommm!” he shouts, but there’s a laugh in his voice as he squirms in her arms. She wiggles her fingers under his shirt until she finds the weak spots to the front of his kidneys and tickles until he’s laughing with his whole body.

“Mercy! Uncle! I tap, I tap,” Sasuke says as they jump down from a fire escape.

“That was a decent kick back there,” Mikoto says with a smile as she places her son on the ground. “Next time, rotate with your whole torso, not just your legs.”

“Okay. But, you know mom, tickling is cowardly,” he says, smoothing his clothes down with all the attitude of a full-grown clan head.

“All’s fair in love and war, my son,” she says, patting his rumpled hair.

“So the kick and the body check,” says a new voice. “S’that what love is?”

Sasuke’s gaze snaps up to the mouth of the alley, where a pair of bright blue eyes are watching them. It’s the boy from the woods, the boy with the mud, and Sasuke almost calls out to him.

The boy watches the pair for a quick, cool moment before his shoulders start to tremble. He catches himself, flashes Sasuke a forced smile, and disappears back into the street.

“Sorry, uh. Nevermind.”

Mikoto grips Sasuke’s wrists and stares at the space the blonde child left behind. She feels like she’s been slapped by a distant memory, and it ruptures a half-healed wound. It’s the light in the eyes, she thinks to herself. Minato’s eyes, sky blue and penetrating, Minato’s wispy wheat-gold hair, but the open expression and the depth of emotion beneath is Kushina all over.

Sasuke scans his mother’s face and finds her lip trembling and her eyes glassy with tears.

“Mom. Are you okay?”

“You know that boy.”

Sasuke thinks about lying, but nods instead.

“Is he a good boy like you?”

“He’s…funny. He’s not very smart, but.”

Mikoto laughs and it turns into the bark of an aborted sob. She wipes her eyes with the heels of her hands, trying to wipe away the memory of Kushina’s wan face, the red of her long hair pooling like blood against the white silk lining of the casket.

“Be nice to him, Sasuke. Not everyone is as lucky as you.”

Sasuke stares down at his sandals and nods.

“Now let’s go have some dinner. Your brother and your father are at the forum tonight. We can eat anything we want.”

Sasuke looks up, the hint of a smile threatening to bloom.

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

“Even that place in the foreign quarter? Mom, I heard they make a sauce out of tomatoes for your noodles…”

Mikoto takes her son’s hand as they leave the alley. She feels a surge of gratitude for his wisdom when he lets her hold it all the way to the restaurant.


	6. Chapter 6

Fugaku wants desperately to rub the bridge of his nose, or to dig a knuckle into his temple or the aching hollow on the inside of his eye sockets, but the pillar of the Uchiha must project strength at all times.

“Here,” says the deputy chief of the MPF, handing him a canteen. “Drink some water.”

“Daichi, my mother died years ago. But with you around I hardly miss her.”

Tonight’s forum has a long docket, and two of the items in particular spark another migraine wave every time he thinks of them. The cloying incense isn’t helping any, and neither is the low but insistent tug on his chakra from the ceremonial flame pits on either side of his presiding chair.

But what needles Fugaku most of all is the young man at the pulpit before him.

Shisui stands in his southern rite ceremonial robes, a high collared sleeveless shift over calf-length black baji, and a vibrant red jeogori with the clan standard embroidered on the back and sleeves. Kagami’s gunbai is strapped to his back, and in place of his hitaiate, Shisui’s thick waves are held back by a beaded band, three iridescent raven’s feathers tucked behind his ear.

“State your name.”

“First Lieutenant Uchiha Shisui of the Konoha Military Police Force. Alias Shisui of the Body Flicker, alias Shisui of the mangekyo. Bearer of the kotoamatsukami.”

It’s presumptuous, coming in ritual garb. The council only agreed to hear Shisui’s case. The issue of the future clan head’s shadow is still open, as far as Fugaku is concerned. But it’s the presumption of the worthy, for tied to the handle of the gunbai is a sash dripping with colors and medals, a testament to the lieutenant’s exemplary service record, both as a fighter in the third Great War and a member of the MPF.

“And your request?”

“That I receive the blessing of the council and the esteemed elders to serve as the shadow to the lord-in-waiting.”

There’s something in the boy’s eyes that makes Fugaku uneasy. They’re too bright, the kind of eyes that throw open old wardrobes and shake out the bones there. The clan has its share of secrets, but none of them seem sufficiently buried with Shisui around.

“You may continue, young man,” says an elder clanswoman from the council booth.

“That the Uchiha should remain strong, that our leader not fear the loss of light in years to come, and that I may serve my village and what’s left of my family to my utmost ability, I humbly ask the council to bind my service to Lord Itachi.”

When Fugaku is being honest with himself, even he has to admit that there’s no better candidate than Shisui. Shisui is a rare genius with rare eyes, and he would have been the talent of a generation—but then came Itachi.

“And you would give your life, your sight itself, your very eyes, should the young lord have need?”

“Absolutely. One hundred percent, yes.”

The jewel of the Uchiha sits to the side of the council booth with the other clansmen summoned to tonight’s forum. Fugaku eyes the red ribbon woven into his son’s hair with a creeping trepidation. It seems both boys came with a certain expectation.

“This is preposterous,” says a councilwoman. “Their bloodlines are too distant. Even if the young lord had need of the lieutenant’s eyes, the transplant would be dangerous. Only a fool would attempt it between such distant relations.”

“Shisui has Kagami’s eyes,” says an elder councilman. “We must consider carefully who should have first right to them should Shisui pass.”

“The mangekyo of the kotoamatsukami, hm, it’s even better than Kagami’s,” says a councilwoman in reply. “But who better than Lord Fugaku’s heir?”

“Well ask the lord himself! Lord Fugaku, Itachi is your son,” says a third. “Your thoughts?”

Fugaku steeples his fingers in front of his lips and takes a bracing breath. As a clan head, he approves. As a father, though—

“Itachi. Come to the pulpit,” he says.

Itachi rises from his seat with his typical grace. He ascends the dais and steps up to the pulpit as Shisui moves to the side to give him room.

“You should give the binding your blessing, Fugaku. Shisui is the only person who can beat Itachi in a hand-to-hand fight. If they’re bound, Itachi’s status as the clanhead will go unchallenged,” Daichi whispers.

“Hm.”

It’s only then that Fugaku really notices his son’s attire. More than the red ribbon in the neat plait, there’s a necklace of jade magatama and earrings to match, an heirloom from Fugaku’s grandmother. He clears his throat.

“State your name.”

“Captain Uchiha Itachi of the Konoha Special Assassination and Tactical Squad. Heir apparent to Lord Fugaku, head of the clan.”

And tucked into the belt that cinches his high-collared clan blacks is a ceremonial mirror with trigrams and runes carved in relief around the border. It’s an unfamiliar artifact, and by its southern style Fugaku suspects it’s a gift from Shisui.

“Your coming of age is yet a year from now,” says an old woman. “Can you be sure you’re ready to accept a lifelong commitment?”

That the boys are treating it as a betrothal is plain to Fugaku. It’s unsurprising—Fugaku is no fool, and he’s tried and failed to cleanse the gentle softness from his eldest son—but it’s worrying as well. Uchiha customs and Uchiha attitudes toward love of one kind or another have always been left of the norm. It’s part of the complex formula that led the clan to its current state, its heart edged almost out of the village, its power where the hokage can keep careful watch. Whatever exists between them won’t serve them outside the compound walls.

“I have no doubts,” Itachi says.

Fugaku aches for his brilliant, often troubled son. The world as it is now isn’t kind enough for Itachi, who for all his fearsome strength lacks the hardened heart of a true warrior.

“And would you have the lieutenant’s sharingan should the light leave yours?”

Itachi’s dark eyes close, and he lifts his face to the ceremonial flames as he thinks. His latent power is amplified in this sacred space, and the elders feel it, Fugaku himself feels it. The firelight softens Itachi’s angular form and dances against his glossy hair, and he’s all pale skin and stark, dark clothing, an apparition in the smoke. Shisui beside him is a riotous shock of color, tawny skin and thick-muscled limbs and eyes bright and flashing red for a moment as he gazes with a heated, open affection at the clan head’s son.

“Well? Would you consent to the binding, young lord?”

“The lieutenant is just one of many potential shadows in the clan. We could match you to both to suitable alternatives,” says an elder clansman.

“Preserving the two strongest sharingan of their generation should take priority over their preference in this matter,” says a clanswoman.

“Precisely,” says Fugaku with a frustrated wave of his hand.

Itachi’s eyes open, and a hush descends on the crowd. He looks to Shisui, away from the council, and only Fugaku, sitting directly in front of them, can see the resolution in his face. Fugaku alone can see Shisui’s puckish wink, and the subtle flush on his son’s cheek as he turns back to the council.

“I will not consent to anyone but him, now or otherwise,” Itachi says, calm but firm, the smooth baritone of his voice ringing clear across the open amphitheater.

Fugaku considers the vaguely stunned silence of the elders. He allows himself a heavy sigh.

“Very well. If it pleases the council to conclude the matter?” he says.

“Aye,” says the oldest man in the council. A chorus of ‘ayes’ follow.

“That settles it, then,” says a gravelly voice from the back of the booth.

The members of the council shift to either side to let through the small, bent form of an old woman, pulling herself along by a gnarled cane.

“Master Akiha,” Fugaku says, rising from his chair.

Itachi’s brows knit as the old woman hobbles over to the pulpit. Shisui grabs his hand and squeezes hard.

“Hello, child,” the woman says, turning her weathered face to Shisui.

“Hi, granny.”

“And our young lord, hello there.”

“Good evening.”

She reaches for their joined hands with a toothless smile.

“Hope you’ll excuse an old woman’s superstitions,” she says with a rough laugh. “People my age are used to doing things a certain way.”

“By all means, Master Akiha,” Fugaku says, seating himself once more.

“I suspect you’ve cleansed your hearts of doubt?” the old woman says to the boys.

Shisui laughs and it breaks at the end, but he gives the old woman a nod. Itachi only smiles, a tense but happy thing, pinched at the corners as he tries to suppress the grin it wants to be.

“You brought your mother’s headsash,” she says, reaching for Shisui’s thick black hair. “She was a fine woman.”

Shisui tips his head down so she can pull the knot from the beaded band. The old woman lays the band over their wrists, looping it around twice before tying it tight with a neat bow.

She cups the boys’ joined hands and runs her gnarled thumbs over their knuckles, tight and white with nerves.

“Well then. I call upon Homusubi, he who starts fires, to ignite the undying flame of loyalty between these hearts.”

She pulls away, twists her old arthritic fingers with surprising speed, boar-tiger-rabbit-horse-rabbit-rat, and says:

“Kagutsuchi no jutsu!”

It hits Shisui first, a lick of pain from his palm where it presses against Itachi’s. A tongue of flame winds up around their arms in spirals, setting every pathway, every nerve to painful activation. The shock of it makes him want to pull away, but he holds tight, even as the pain spreads up his arm, up his neck, pooling behind his eyes, forcing his mangekyo to whorl to life.

“Shisui,” Itachi says, pain pinching the slim almond of his eyes to a slash of ruby red, lit from within with an eldritch light. When the pain touches his eyes, he squeezes Shisui’s hands with a bone-crushing strength.

“Hold fast,” Shisui hisses, pressing close until the line of their arms and hips touch.

“Open your eyes, young lord,” the old woman cries over the crackle of chakra-fueled flames.

Itachi swallows against the burning pain and opens his eyes wide.

They stand in an endless field of black. The scent of ozone and petrichor rises up from the dark ground, and an icy rain spills over them in sheets, cooling the burn of the chakra flames. The fire is gone, but so is the council, the platform, the pulpit. It’s them, only them in endless darkness, stiff and lightly trembling, until a voice like a thunderclap booms from the dark.

“Children of the mirror wheel eye. Kneel before your god.”

Lightning flashes in the vast space, and for one terrifying moment, the great scowling face of Susanoo flickers before them.

Shisui drops to one knee, fist braced on the ground, head bowed. Itachi falls into seiza next to him, hands on his thighs, head bowed so low that the long plait of his hair touches the ground.

“The thread of fate sews the ruination and salvation of your kind deep within you, sons of Indra. It binds you as a seam, a seam that must not be rent. What you do, you must do together to the very end. Fealty unto death, each the other’s lord. Show me that you understand.”

Shisui lifts his head, mangekyo shining on the darkened features of the god. Itachi tips his face up, vision blurring at the edges as his sharingan spins and spins in an effort to split the endless dark.

“Show me that you understand,” the god repeats.

They look to each other, wordless, eyes locking, the glow of red on red drawing long shadows down their faces.

It’s writ there in the lines of Shisui’s face, Itachi can see it clearly. This is the one who will deliver him from the rotting hell of battle to the safety of the pure land. Shisui wears a look of such open adoration that Itachi knows at once the blood that drips from the corners of his big upturned eyes are tears of joy, knows that they’re both feeling this indescribable warmth, the moment of total surety, that this is a bigger love than either of them, big as the towering god before them and bigger still.

“Show me that you understand.”

They reach for each other's eyes.

**

Itachi comes to in the dark of an unfamiliar room. He can hear the chorus of the dawn’s timid prelude, a thrush and a wren and a warbling blackbird. He feels the damp of a fever sweat clinging to the small of his back. There is a weight, warm and solid, behind him.

“You’re up.”

Shisui’s voice is a hoarse whisper between his shoulder blades. It sends a wave of goosebumps down Itachi’s bare arms.

“We passed out. Granny said we should stay together for the next twelve hours, so they brought us to my house.”

Itachi shifts incrementally, body stiff and aching, until he’s facing Shisui.

“Good morning,” Shisui says.

“Bold of you to call it morning.”

Shisui doesn’t answer, only shifts his body closer till their knees touch, lays his hand on Itachi’s hip. Itachi reaches up to sift his fingers through Shisui’s hair, stiff with the residue of sweat and smoke.

“Itachi,” Shisui says, voice thick. It’s a marvel of a thing, barely three syllables, a command and a surrender and a promise woven through with a crumbling resistance, a heavy want, and it’s all Itachi needs to lift the final seal on his own restraint.

And he moves, and his breath catches, and he shimmies, and there’s a slip down his spine, and he pins Shisui’s shoulders, and his hands are trembling, and his hair falls in inky tendrils over Shisui’s face, and his eyes flutter closed, and he rolls his hips, and that’s when Shisui breaks.

It starts a sequence that leaves clothes shredded and sheets napped and a splintering crack in the shutters on the open window, and ends in a slick, shaking press against the tatami floor, his arms rubbed raw where he leans on them, the chorus in his ears Shisui Shisui Shisui but it’s his own voice couched in by the thunderous beat of his heart, muffled like an underwater voice, his eyes rolled back and sightless, his skin sore and singing and an ache, sacred, harrowing and bone-deep, an ache that, from that moment till the day he dies, Itachi never, ever shakes.


	7. Chapter 7

Sasuke sits on the bough of a wide, ancient sycamore, back to the trunk, dangling a leg over the harried campsite below.

“Boys! You have five minutes. If I find one scrap of evidence that you were here, thats a fail for every single one of you,” Iruka yells from the side of the clearing.

Sasuke watches his new classmates run around picking up bent twigs and scattering earth and generally flailing. He’s done his part already—he’s been on survival training missions with the clan since he was six, and stealth is instinct for him now, two years later.

“Two minute warning, boys! I need you done and concealed before the end of my count.”

His eyes trace the flash of gold scurrying back and forth. He can’t help it, really. In the dim evening light, the yellow hair and orange clothes draw the eye.

“Sixty seconds!”

Naruto scans the clearing and makes a beeline for Sasuke’s tree. It’s not an obvious choice—it’s an old tree, not a lot of low hanging branches to climb, but anyone who climbs enough trees can tell it’s a comfortable tree once you’re up. The blonde bearclimbs until he can a decent foothold, then hefts himself up to the canopy with surprising speed.

They’ve been classmates for a few months now, and though Sasuke has decided the blonde is definitely a moron, he’s a harmless moron. But even Sasuke, top of the class in taijutsu, has to admit that what the kid lacks in coordination he makes up for in scrappiness and raw strength.

“Thats ten seconds left, nine, eight—”

He scrambles up to a thick bough right below Sasuke’s perch and wipes his sweaty brow.

“Waaaah, made it. Oh, dickhead! You’re here too!”

“Seven, six—”

“Shut up, idiot,” Sasuke hisses, pressing himself flat against the smooth bark of the sycamore.

“Oh, right, right.”

“Four, three, two—”

Naruto flops onto the branch on his stomach, tucking his limbs up like a frog.

“And that’s the count!” Iruka shouts from below. “Absolute stillness! If you give yourself away, I’m docking ten percent!”

He stalks around the campsite, peering into bushes and behind trees. Sasuke bites his lip—something about their chuunin instructor’s face tells him there’s another shoe to drop.

“You’re all reasonably concealed for cadets. That’s good. Now, you’ll have to prove you can stay concealed. Wherever you are right now, that’s where you stay until first light. I will be testing you for vigilance. If I happen to catch you sleeping, it’s a ten point deduction.”

There’s a collective groan from the shadows of the forest.

“No whining. In a mission scenario, you may have to remain concealed for long periods of time. Show me that you can, and we can stop for pancakes on the way back from the village.”

There’s a collective cheer from the shadows of the forest.

“Silence! The assignment starts now.”

Sasuke leans back against the trunk of the sycamore, centers his mind, tries to prepare his body for the attentive repose of tree-rest. He’s just about focused and relaxed when the boughs around him start to jitter and shake.

“Psst.”

The blue eyes that peer up at him seem to glow in the speckled moonlight. There’s an animal quality to those eyes, a vague animal musk Sasuke can smell beneath campfire and sweat and herb salves over bug bites, a smell that curls his lip and seeps the ease from his body. Replaces it with slippy excitement, something syrupy and fond.

“We could take shifts, y’know. And sleep.”

Sasuke scowls, heat in his cheeks.

“You wanna sleep don’t ya?”

Naruto pulls himself up until he’s level with Sasuke on an adjacent bough.

“C’mon, it’s not a bad idea.”

And it isn’t. But Sasuke didn’t think of it himself. They lock eyes for a tense moment. Sasuke’s eye twitches, but Naruto’s are blue and glowing.

“You can go first,” he says by way of concession.

“No,” Sasuke says, crossing his arms. “You go first.”

Naruto smiles smug and happy and Sasuke bites his cheek to keep his face neutral. Naruto shuffles down until he’s mostly reclined on the wide branch. He folds his hands behind his head and lets one leg fall to the side, hanging down. Takes no precautions against falling, like sensible shinobi. Just melts into the tree, so easy and natural and quick that Sasuke blinks at the change. Naruto cracks one bright blue eye.

“Wake me when it’s my turn, okay?”

“Hm. Whatever,” Sasuke says, turning to look down at the clearing.

And soon he can hear the even breaths, wispy like the chattering leaves. Sasuke listens for the almost imperceptible rustle of Iruka’s gentle movements. He catalogues his classmates sloppy attempts at stealth. He watches the moon sweep across the cloud-streaked sky. Sasuke can feel the cold descend with the peak of night. Finally, when he’s absolutely sure he can hear the rhythm of sleep, he peers over at Naruto’s sleeping face.

This is the moment he remembers years later when they cling like snakes to dancing treetops in the land of waves. It’s the same feeling, awed and a little shy, impressed despite himself and confusion put in place of denial, because this is a feeling he’s never been able to deny, not really.

And in the thrall of the tingling feeling, an icy rush creeps down the back of Sasuke’s neck, and he feels all the hairs on his body prickle at once. He’s up and crouched with kunai drawn, Naruto’s prone body behind him, eyes wide and searching. He squints in the dark, and the ghost white face of a cat shifts up and to the side, revealing something gaunt and just as pale. His brother’s unmistakable red eyes pierce through the gloom.

“I’m sorry,” Itachi says, voice tense and quiet. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just needed to know that you were okay.”

Sasuke squints, heart slamming in his chest. There’s a rush and a soft creak as the weight on the branch is doubled. Shisui materializes behind Itachi, red-eyed and grim.

“Come on,” he says. “You’re scaring him. He’s fine.”

Naruto shifts, scrubbing his face with both hands.

“What’s going on. Is it my turn?”

Sasuke spares a glance back behind him, afraid to speak, adrenaline blowing out all his senses. It hurts, he feels betrayed by his body, aghast that he could feel so afraid of someone he loves so much. He needs to check again, needs to correct this jagged feeling, but when he turns back to look for them, they’re gone.

“Hey. Jerk face. Is it Iruka?”

“Go back to sleep, moron,” Sasuke says, slumping boneless against the tree trunk. “It was nothing.”

Naruto doesn’t say anything, doesn’t talk back, but he doesn’t listen. He shimmies up until he’s sitting, legs dangling down. He gets comfortable, crossing his arms over his chest.

Sasuke sits limp against the tree on the branch next to Naruto’s, and their elbows touch. He grips the kunai in a loose fist between his legs and wills his breathing to slow. Naruto looks at him sidelong but stays quiet. Quiet and uncharacteristically still, solid and somehow comforting as they sit side-by-side and wait for the dawn to come.

“I thought they wouldn’t let me go,” Naruto says at last. Sasuke picks at the bark with his kunai. “To the academy, I mean.”

“Why they let in a loser like you, I’ll never know.”

“I’m glad though. I’m gonna be hokage some day, you better believe it.”

Sasuke chips away at the wood, sketching out the shape of an uchiwa in the bark.

“You’re a moron. Plus, you already told me that. A long time ago.”

Sasuke can feel Naruto’s eyes on him. He hums a few bars of the oldest song he knows, letting the melody guide his hand as he carves the Uchiha clan mon deep into the bark. He can feel Naruto soften and shift, leaning into the moment of recognition, of memory.

“Oh. You.” Naruto says, and doesn’t say anything more.

They watch it paint the clearing four different colors, deep violet giving way to eventual gold, each of them sad and a little confused for reasons they don’t fully comprehend yet. It takes Iruka three calls to get them to assemble with the others down below.

They reunite with the girls on the way to the pancake house. Sasuke sits off to the side, as far away as he can from the raucous group. He has no interest in whatever the girls did at kunoichi training, unlike most of his peers. He thinks about the pale face and the red eyes in the dark, and the echo of the fear clings to him. He pushes at the food on his plate—he hates sweets—and listens through the din, for some strange reason, for the bright bark of Naruto’s laughter.


End file.
